my new motherboard has something that intreqgues me..

I bought myself a Gigabyte K7 Triton GA7N400Pro-2 motherboard, and i happened to notice this little chip embedded in it. "nVIDIA nForce 2 MCP Chip" someone care to help me out with what exactly that is? Is it on board video? what is it? :\

Also undernethe this fan is labled "nVIDIA nForce 2 Ultra 400", is that the same thing? or what ?

The nForce2 MCP is the Fast-Ehternet contoller/chipset/whatever.
The Ultra 400 is a built-in GPU I think, but I'm not sure.

i should also mention i know minimal hardware lingo, i know what CPU stands for and I/O, but nothing else.

OK, I'll try to explain a bit more plainly.
The MCP chip is the ehternet. You probably have an RJ-45 connector at the back (the one you plug your ethernet cable in, a bit bigger than your phone socket), that's what it takes care of.
A GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit, a video card, in other words. Anything else you need answered?

so this has a built in video card? or do i need one to fit in the AGP slot to power it?

Oops! My bad, I should really check things before I post.
The MCP seems to be the south bride, which also has integrated 5.1 audio.
The Ultra 400 is the north bride, which can give you double PC3200 performance, meaning 2x2x200 memory speed, giving you up to 6.4GB/s transfers. Of course with the appropiate memory sticks (high quality PC3200 RAM).
Note: The north bridge inter-connects the processor, memory and AGP bus (graphics card).
The south bridge takes care of everything else.

Thar ya go, that's about right. Glad you caught your mistake :)

god i feel stupid. That made alot more sense but what im gathering from it: one handles the audio capabilities, one handles the memory capabilities and powers the video card?

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Originally Posted by DarkViper

god i feel stupid. That made alot more sense but what im gathering from it: one handles the audio capabilities, one handles the memory capabilities and powers the video card?

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Sort of. The north bridge connects the high speed buses (FSB and AGP), and it's the fastest of the two bridges (some even have a fan to cool them).
The south bridge connects the slow speed buses, which is everything else. They connect with each other, but it's slow. It will take care of any PCI cards you have, IDE cables (hard drives, CD/DVD drives and floppy drives), USB, in your case, it also takes care of the on-bloard 5.1 APU (audio processing unit) and Ethernet connection(s).
I don't know if I'm missing something. The north and south bridges talk to each other when the processor needs info from the slow buses, to pass it on.
This will change soon, however. The new PCI Express bus is even faster than AGP, so I don't know how they'll handle this in the future. BTX format may change the way they operate too, so this info is gonna be out-dated soon (maybe by summer).

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Originally Posted by -=SoKrA=-

Sort of. The north bridge connects the high speed buses (FSB and AGP), and it's the fastest of the two bridges (some even have a fan to cool them).
The south bridge connects the slow speed buses, which is everything else. They connect with each other, but it's slow. It will take care of any PCI cards you have, IDE cables (hard drives, CD/DVD drives and floppy drives), USB, in your case, it also takes care of the on-bloard 5.1 APU (audio processing unit) and Ethernet connection(s).
I don't know if I'm missing something. The north and south bridges talk to each other when the processor needs info from the slow buses, to pass it on.
This will change soon, however. The new PCI Express bus is even faster than AGP, so I don't know how they'll handle this in the future. BTX format may change the way they operate too, so this info is gonna be out-dated soon (maybe by summer).

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It has already changed. With the Athlon 64 having an onboard memory controler many board don't have a north/south setup (northbridge normally contains the memory controler. No need for that now) , instead they have only one chip that handles all the remaining functionality.

Also, unless I'm crazy PCI Express is not physically faster than AGP. What I mean by that is I'm pretty sure it still runs at (a true) 66 MHz, however, it's bi-directional and parallel (up to 32 lanes).

Well, that's only true for some Athlon64s (FX ones).
About PCI Express, I was looking through the nVidia site and couldn't find any real info on what it's gonna be like, so I'm not sure about that. I guess I'll have to research a bit more.

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Originally Posted by -=SoKrA=-

Well, that's only true for some Athlon64s (FX ones).
About PCI Express, I was looking through the nVidia site and couldn't find any real info on what it's gonna be like, so I'm not sure about that. I guess I'll have to research a bit more.

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No, that's true for ALL Athlon 64's. Whether the motherboard has north/south bridge or just a single chip is up to the motherboard manufacturer. ALL Athlon 64's have on-die memory controler.

As for PCI Express, I'm still a little bit in the dark about that. Seems like nobody knows what's going on with it :p

No point in looking at nVidia's website though, this is not a video card only thing. All devices will work on PCI Express, but, there will be different types of PCI Express devices.

More info:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1087

OK, it seems you're the expert on this :p so I'll assume you're right.
I know there's not much point in looking at the nVidida website, but I was already there, and I didn't feel like typing another address.

Hardware is my thang :p

Here's a little more info on the PCI-express thing... (hopefully the articles are still there, I posted the links over a month ago.)

http://www.flashdaddee.com/forums/sh...&threadid=9364